The Disunited States

George W. Bush says he will end partisan politics. But the breakdown of poll numbers proves the gap between rural and urban, black and white, and men and women is greater than it has ever been, writes Ed Vulliamy

"America," said George W. Bush in the garden of his Governor"s mansion in Austin, Texas, last Wednesday afternoon, "has a long tradition of uniting once elections are over." He promised that an administration led by him would "reach out" to "supporters of Al Gore", as part of his much-vaunted pledge to "put an end to partisanship" in Washington.

But everyone knows that his victory in this election (and the hegemony of his party in both the Senate and the House) would be a sticking plaster which barely conceals a bitterly and evenly divided nation. There is a glaring abyss between rival campaign programmes from ideas on social security and healthcare to education and foreign policy with little room for compromise between a tax-cut policy - Bush"s - that sets aside $1.3 trillion (of which 43 per cent goes to the top one per cent of earners earning more than $319,000 a year) and its rival - Gore"s - worth a third of that, which gives no tax break to anyone earning more than $100,000. But the rift over policies masks others that run far deeper.

The map of election results, county by county, is stark and astonishing: great tranches of Republican blue across what appears to be the entire country, punctuated by streaks and patches of Democrat red. And yet Gore won the popular vote.

America is divided between concrete and either farmland or wilderness. Where voters are packed into cities, they are Democrats; where they live on or close to the land, they are Republican. Gore won the popular vote by taking three coastal states by vast majorities - New York by 1.5 million, California by 1.2 million and New Jersey by 400,000. He also split the big-city suburbs with the Republicans - unusually for a Democrat candidate.

Voters in cities with populations greater than half a million handed Gore a landslide of 71 per cent to 25; urban areas between 50,000 and 500,000 favoured him by three votes to two. Meanwhile, six in every ten voters living in small towns under 50,000 opted for Bush. Voters living in rural areas voted for Bush by a ratio of seven to one; the only exceptions were those populated by huge majorities of black or Hispanic voters (the Mississippi Delta and the border counties of Texas and Arizona), the diehard liberal Scandinavian belt across the mid-northern plains and the chic white areas of New Mexico.

The suburbs were evenly contested territory, usually reflecting the size of the urban areas they serve (small-town suburbs voting for Bush, big-city suburbs for Gore). Chicago was a tiny speck of Democrat red surrounded by hard, conservative suburbs. The election was the first fought on an entirely new American map, in which huge swaths of new "Major Metro" areas swung some states for the Democrats that were once contested or even Republican, while former bastions of rural and small-town liberalism turned to the right.

Bush"s father won 61 per cent of knife-edge Florida in 1988, which now hangs on fewer voters than it takes to fill an aeroplane. New Jersey, once a key "swing" state, went safely to Gore. California, once Ronald Reagan"s state, was the banker on which Gore depended to keep his hopes alive. These are states of urban and suburban sprawl where issues such as abortion choice and gun control are popular among the "waitress Moms" and their families.

Meanwhile Gore had to fight hard for rural states easily won by Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988 - Iowa and Minnesota - and suffered the humiliation of losing a crucial handful of Democrat strongholds won by Bill Clinton: the President"s home state of Arkansas, Ohio, Arizona, Missouri, West Virginia and, probably, Oregon.

The phenomenon was most painfully illustrated by the loss of Gore's home-farm state of Tennessee - for which both he and his father were Senators - and with it the 11 electoral college seats that would have won him the presidency without Florida.

These are no longer rural states in which voters are loyal to the immigrant values of their grandparents; they are church-going, gun-loving states, hostile to government and regulation, independent and bloody-minded, and they were morally offended by the Clinton administration. With the two demographic groups now evenly numbered, sociologists are trying to establish which has peaked - and tend to agree on bad news for the Democrats. Gore won only a quarter as many counties as Bush, with indications that populations are growing in Gore counties by an average of five per cent over the past decade, while those in Bush counties are increasing by 14 per cent, as immigrants move into the cities while "natives" move out in search of better housing.

America is further divided between Venus and Mars. "If men alone had voted," said Patricia Ireland, director of the National Organisation of Women, "Bush would have won the presidency hands down." Bush is, indeed, the President of men (with 54 per cent against 42 for Gore) and Gore of women (52 per cent as opposed to 43 for Bush). The total, combined voting gap is 21 per cent; never before has there been such a dichotomy between the male and female vote. The right-wing commentator Chris Matthews described (in mocking terms) the Democrat party as the "Mommy party" and the Republicans as the "Daddy party" - and he is objectively right. Gore"s policies this election engaged with (and were tailored to engage with) the concerns of women who are more likely than men to be what the Americans call "care givers" to the young and elderly, and who believe that their dependants may one day need the government safety net.

Women respondents at the exit polls gave policy priorities which dovetailed into Gore"s programmes for healthcare, prescription subsidies and social security pensions, as well as the traditional womens" priorities of public education and abortion. Women too, as shown by the summer"s "Million Mom March", are staunchly in favour of gun controls. Bush"s policies, meanwhile, appealed to traditionally "male" values. He used the mantra "personal responsibility" to underwrite a planned social security system with an enhanced role for the private sector, market-oriented medical and prescription coverage and an education policy that subsidises private school places.

The gender gap becomes complicated, however, when men and women are grouped by other defining characteristics such as race and work status. Bush narrowly carried the white female vote, by 49 to 48 per cent, and comfortably won the support of women who do not work outside their own home, by 52 per cent to 44.

The factors behind these shifts combine geography and race - the latter, now more than ever, a political dividing line. African-Americans account for some 10 per cent of the electorate, but only 10-18 per cent of them vote. This year, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People and Jesse Jackson embarked on a campaign to rectify this pitifully low turnout - to significant effect. Before the election, a poll by the Zogby organisation found 70 per cent of blacks planning to vote for Gore, while 17 per cent said they would vote Bush. In the event, 90 per cent of the black vote went to Gore - and in places where it mattered.

In Florida, the black vote totals 13 per cent, 10 per cent of whom turned out to vote in 1996. This year, that figure jumped to 16 per cent. In another state targeted by the NAACP, Missouri, the black turnout increased from 5 per cent in 1996 to 12 per cent - even though the state went to Bush.

In New York, which has the highest black population in the US, the turnout lifted from nine to 11 per cent, crucial to Hillary Clinton"s success but to little effect for Gore. In Tennessee, the black vote soared from 13 to 20 per cent - almost all of it Democrat, but not enough to rescue Gore. Hispanic voters, constituting 7 per cent of the electorate, up on five from 1996, went to the polls in record high numbers. But the effect was muted, since about 75 per cent of the Hispanic vote is cast in two states, Texas and California.

In the end, the ethnic map reads: 52 per cent of whites voted for Bush, 42 for Gore; 33 per cent of Hispanics for Bush, 62 for Gore; 38 per cent of Asians for Bush, 57 for Gore.

The income map is complicated and the only one that does not show a fundamental rift between the candidates. Of those earning under $15,000, 58 per cent voted for Gore, only 37 for Bush. The solid middle class (between $30,000 to $49,000) also backed Gore, by 49 per cent to 37. But the lower middle class ($15,000 to $29,000) backed Bush by 53 per cent to 41. Above $50,000, Bush voters beat Gore voters, but only by between three and four per cent - until the magic figure of $100,000, after which 53 per cent backed Bush and 43 went for Gore.

The cultural rift is a harder one to measure, although everyone knows what it means - the end of the "Clinton era" in which a certain approach to moral issues had its time in the White House. Al Gore was of course at pains to create as great a distance from the Lewinsky scandal as his opponent, but apparently failed to convince a crucial slice of the electorate for whom the scandal was an important, and prohibitive, factor.

In election terms, "Clinton values" are no more than a metaphor for specific behaviour aligning with one party rather than another. Exit polls showed Bush as the champion of people who go to church at least once a week, and who think it is more important that a President be a "moral leader" than a "good government manager".

These views form part of an increasingly congealed, job-lot package of "traditional" values in American society, whereby there is almost a chain reaction between apparently separate issues: firebrand religious observance, pride in the right to bear arms without a child-proof lock, opposition to abortion and gay marriage and hostility towards federal government and public spending.

Gore, for all his caging of President Clinton and his own deep religious faith (as well as the appointment of prime moralist Joe Lieberman), failed to court the self-consciously "moral" constituency, tied as it was to the accompanying baggage.

He did, however, score well among those whom the conservatives regard as standard bearers for Sodom and Gomorrah: pro-choice women, gays, those who rarely or never attend church. The exception to this pattern was Gore"s overwhelming support among Jews and black churchgoers; Catholics (which in America usually means Hispanic, Irish, Italian or Polish) were split between the candidates, with a majority for Gore, despite his position on abortion.

This group has its own "liberal" chain reaction, which entails support for stricter gun laws, belief in the notion of government as benign, that a bad public school should be fixed rather than its children encouraged to move to private schools, and - according to the wording of some exit polls - "caring about people like me". Among this group the priority for a President is "competence to handle complex issues".

Despite criticism - not least from his own party chairman - that Gore had erred in cutting the President out of his campaign, the statistics on the great moral divide seem to prove him right. Some 45 per cent of voters called the Lewinsky scandal fairly or very important in their thinking, and most of them voted for Bush.

That didn"t stop President Clinton from stealing the best line of the "Day After", however. "The American people have spoken," he said, mimicking just about every Presidential acceptance speech on record, including his own. And he laughed: "But it may take a while to work out what they said."

About this article

The Disunited States

This article appeared in the Observer
on Saturday 11 November 2000.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 21.19 EST on Saturday 11 November 2000.
It was last modified at 06.19 EDT on Saturday 4 October 2014.